Walking Out During a Sermon

In the past 40 years I have presented over 400 sermons on apologetics. Apologetics is the science of giving reasons for the Christian faith based on history, science, and facts. The study of apologetics is central to building a foundation for the Christian faith. It is a rational response against the objections that people bring up against Christianity. Most philosophy textbooks have a section on why people reject God. One of the main reasons is because so much evil exists in the world. This is a problem that all religious traditions must deal with.

The problem of evil arises from a worldview that makes the following assumptions: a supreme being (God) exists that is all-powerful, all-knowing, and perfectly good. Evil includes both moral evil (humans harming others) and natural evil (disease, natural disasters). We all have witnessed sickness and death in our family, friends, and relatives. One major reason people leave Christianity is because they have seen much sickness and death, a topic I have written an entire book about titled Darwinism is the Doorway to Atheism.

In my sermon on disease I show that both bacteria and viruses are essential for life, as also is water, food, and air. Like water, food, air, bacteria and viruses can become contaminated. This is the problem. I have given this sermon many times, consistently with an very positive response. The last time was to an audience that, I was told, numbered over eight-thousand. I was very gratified by the many favorable comments afterward, which was supported by selling a large box of books on this topic after the sermon.

I recently gave the same sermon at a church in Toledo that was not as favorably received.  A few people even walked out of the service. After the service, at the brunch, I talked with several church members. The opinion was, as stated by one science teacher, “it does not matter if humans evolved or were created. Either way, God did it.” If I had responded to her, I would have mentioned that the purpose Darwin developed his theory of evolution was to, in Darwin’s words, murder God. If Darwin walked on Earth today, he would be amazed at how successful he was. Before Darwin, 99 percent of all naturalists and highly educated people believed in God. Today, 98 percent of all scientists and naturalists are functional atheists, living their life as if there was no God. Ironically, the evidence against molecules to man evolution is overwhelming and is believed because the only other option is God, which many people today cannot accept.

Darwin realized that the main reason, in his day and in ours, people believe in God is the wondrous existence of all nature. Therefore, Darwin realized that he needed to come up with another explanation for the existence of creation. That naturalistic explanation was evolution. Darwin, when in college, as was required of all students in the 1800s, to read the book by the Christian apologist, William Paley, titled Natural Theology.

In brief, Paley argued a watch implies a watchmaker, and a complex world implies a world-maker, who is God. Complexity implies purpose, and purpose implies design. Thus, the complexity of the visual cortex, the rods, cones, and the eyeball were all designed for the purpose of vision. The argument from, or appeal to, design argues that we see evidence of intelligent design everywhere we look—in the function and structure of the eye, the symmetry of a honeybee's wings, or the narrow range of values in the laws of physics that allows for the existence of intelligent life. Darwin rejected this reasoning.

Because creation is central to Christianity, a main focus of atheism is to convince others of evolution. As explained in a leading atheist journal, “Creationists have shown irrefutably that those liberal and neo-orthodox Christians who regard the creation stories as myths or allegories are undermining the rest of Scripture, for if there was no Adam, there was no fall; and if there was no fall, there was no hell; and if there was no hell, there was no need of Jesus as Last Adam and Incarnate Savior, crucified and risen. As a result, the entire biblical system of salvation collapses.”  Evolution was created to cause humans to reject the Creation worldview, thus logically leads to the rejection of the Christian God as I documented in my book, Darwinism is the Doorway to Atheism and also in my 2023 book, Why Did God Create Viruses, Bacteria, and Other Pathogens? (See cover below.)

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